Re: [PATCH 10/10] locking/qspinlock: Elide back-to-back RELEASE operations with smp_wmb()

[Andrea Parri]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 04:27:45PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> Hi Andrea,
> 
> On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 03:05:12PM +0200, Andrea Parri wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 06, 2018 at 12:34:36PM +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> > > I could say something like:
> > > 
> > >   "Pairs with dependency ordering from both xchg_tail and explicit
> > >    dereferences of node->next"
> > > 
> > > but it's a bit cryptic :(
> > 
> > Agreed. ;)  It might be helpful to instead include a snippet to highlight
> > the interested memory accesses/dependencies; IIUC,
> > 
> > /*
> >  * Pairs with dependency ordering from both xchg_tail and explicit/?
> >  * dereferences of node->next:
> >  *
> >  *   CPU0
> >  *
> >  *   /* get node0, encode node0 in tail */
> >  *   pv_init_node(node0);
> >  *     ((struct pv_node *)node0)->cpu   = smp_processor_id();
> >  *     ((struct pv_node *)node0)->state = vcpu_running;
> 
> I'd probably ignore the PV case here and just focus on the native init
> of count/locked/next.
> 
> >  *   smp_wmb();
> >  *   old = xchg_tail(lock, tail);
> >  *
> >  *   CPU1:
> >  *
> >  *   /* get node1, encode tail from node1 */
> >  *   old = xchg_tail(lock, tail);   // = tail corresponding to node0
> >  *                                  // head an addr. dependency
> >  *   /* decode old in prev */
> >  *   pv_wait_node(node1, prev);
> 
> Similarly here -- the dependency is through decode_tail.
> 
> >  *     READ ((struct pv_node *)prev)->cpu   // addr. dependent read
> >  *     READ ((struct pv_node *)prev)->state // addr. dependend read
> >  *
> >  * [More details for the case "following our own ->next pointer" you
> >  *  mentioned dabove.]
> >  */
> > 
> > CPU1 would also have:
> > 
> >    WRITE_ONCE(prev->next, node1); // addr. dependent write
> > 
> > but I'm not sure how this pairs: does this belong to the the second
> > case above? can you elaborate on that?
> 
> This is dependent on the result of decode_tail, so it's still the first
> case. The second case is when we queued into an empty tail but somebody
> later queued behind us, so we don't find them until we're claiming the
> lock:
> 
>   if (!next)
>   	next = smp_cond_load_relaxed(&node->next, (VAL));
> 
>   arch_mcs_spin_unlock_contended(&next->locked);
> 
> here, this is all straightforward address dependencies rather than the
> arithmetic in decode_tail.

Got it. Thanks!

  Andrea


> 
> Will